UX Writing and Content Design Research

Episode Timestamps

0:00 – Introduction and Welcome Yuval

1:44 – Building a UX Writing Community

3:51 – Importance of UX Writing in Products

6:12 – Evolution of Content Design and UX Writing

8:22 – Differences Between UX Writing and Copywriting

10:53 – Challenges in Maintaining Consistency

13:14 – Tools and Methods for Testing Copy

16:54 – Language and Cultural Considerations in UX Writing

22:17 – Risks of Poor UX Writing

28:31 – Team Structure and KPIs for UX Writers

34:50 – Conclusion

Episode Timestamps

“I started like in many different things in tech—like QA and so on—transitioned into graphic design, transitioned into UX design, working in many different product teams, noticing that there isn’t enough attention to the words that appear in the user interface”.​

For Yuval Keshtcher, founder and CEO of the UX Writing Hub, this observation in 2017 sparked a movement. At the time, none of the product teams he worked with had UX writers. Words were an afterthought—something developers filled in, designers approximated with lorem ipsum, and product managers edited hastily before launch.​

Nearly eight years later, UX Writing Hub has grown from a simple Facebook group into a global community of 25,000+ members, a comprehensive training academy that has graduated over 1,200 students, an active blog and podcast (Writers in Tech), and an agency serving clients worldwide.​

Yuval, a new father living in Tel Aviv (“always tired lately,” he jokes), is also deeply invested in how AI will impact digital experiences. In this conversation, he demystifies the difference between UX writing and content design, explains why localization is more than translation, shares frameworks for maintaining consistency, and reveals the catastrophic risks of poor product copy.​

His core message? UX writers are designers too—they just design with words.​​

From Facebook Group to Global Hub

Yuval’s journey began with a simple observation and a modest action.​

“I decided to build a community that talks about it. It started as a Facebook group to be honest. I just invited UX folks and said, ‘Hey, if you want to talk about this overlooked topic, just join this Facebook group and let’s chat'”.​​

The Growth Trajectory

“Back in 2017, Facebook groups probably had maybe a bit more popularity, and it got some traction. Like today it has maybe 25,000 people in that specific Facebook group”.​​

From that foundation, UX Writing Hub expanded into:​​

• A newsletter with a large following
• An active blog covering UX writing best practices
• Writers in Tech podcast which Yuval hosts
• Courses and training including the flagship UX Writing Academy
• An agency providing UX writing services to companies worldwide

“Today I care a lot about UX writing, running the agency of the UX Writing Hub, running the training of the UX Writing Hub, and also highly invested in everything AI and how it could impact the user experience of all of the digital experiences combined”.​​

UX Writing vs. Content Design: The 2021 Research

One of the first questions Yuval addresses is the terminology confusion: are UX writing and content design the same thing?​​

“Back in 2021, we actually ran a very detailed research about these specific terms, comparing them, comparing job posts to each other and so on”.​​

The Findings

“What we found out with that specific research is that it’s more or less the same thing. While Meta will call this field content design, Google will call it UX writing. And it’s just a terminology thing”.​​

“That’s just my opinion, by the way. Some people would argue with that opinion. But at the end of the day, what we’re talking about here is product communication”.​​

Defining Product Communication

“It’s how I, as a communicator, as a content person, am going to communicate this specific feature that we have in our product to our users. How I’m going to communicate it well enough so it will be engaging, so it will increase the conversion if we are on the marketing areas of the product. Also, it will increase the retention if it’s to create better onboarding experiences, or if it’s to reduce the churn—meaning how can I create delightful experiences right now so people are not going to run to my competitor’s products”.​​

The Evolution of Terminology

“When I just started out the UX Writing Hub, many companies called this specific field ‘content strategist,’ and kind of ditched this term because it had too many overlaps with marketing and people wanted to focus more on product communication. And then many companies just changed it to UX writing and also content design”.​​

Why “Design”?

“I think the reason many people call it content design is because they understand that UX writers are designers too. They need to step into the design file. They need to take this specific headline in this specific dialogue box and make sure that they write microcopy—small pieces of copy—that create engaging experiences, but that it will fit one line and not two lines”.​​

“So how can we design right now this sentence so it will fit in the dialog box and still communicate in the best possible way? And that will definitely be considered content design”.​​

The Ownership Question: Marketing vs. Product

Yuval tackles one of the most persistent organizational challenges.​

“Who owns the copy? Is it marketing or is it the product guys or is it the designer? Who owns this?”​​

The Historical Context

“It depends on what time in history are you asking it. Why? Because in 2021-2022, many companies had a lot of money and they were just hiring, hiring, hiring, hiring. And they had a privilege to have a marketing copywriter and also a product writer”.​​

“Companies today—they have that privilege if they have the money to do so, because it is a privilege”.​​

The Reality for Most Companies

“Sometimes they will take this person that is a great communicator and is very skilled and very talented, and they will ask this person to do the marketing writing and also the UX writing”.​​

“So you ask a question about the ownership, which is a very good question, but I will also answer about what is the actual differences between UX writing and copywriting”.​​

Marketing Writing vs. Product Writing

Yuval uses UX Army as an example to illustrate the distinction.​

The Marketing Phase

“Let’s say that you have a product named UX Army, which is a great company and a great product. When you go to the website of UX Army, your goal is to create conversions. You want to make sure that more people will sign up to UX Army, just like any marketing website”.​​

“You are going to do that with copywriting, with marketing writing. You are going to be persuasive—not sleazy, but showing not telling. You will probably show snippets of the product, which you do already. Snippets of your product and maybe some words and paragraphs that say what is the benefit of that product and why you should use it. And that would be marketing writing written by a copywriter”.​​

The Product Phase

“Once the person signs up, you created the conversion. You are going to change the tone completely. You don’t want them to sign in anymore. What you want to do is to guide them through your product”.​​

“You want to make sure that they will know how to use it. You want to make sure that if you have like 10 different features, they will know all of these 10 features in the best possible way and how to use them. You want to keep their engagement from shallow to very deep. You want to create deep connection through the way that they interact with your product”.​​

The Tonal Shift

“That type of communication would be written in a different way. It’s not the salesperson that tries to sell, but it’s like the instructor trying to teach”.​​

“While the company is the same company and the communication needs to be consistent, you are going to change the tone”.​​

The Challenge

“Let’s say that you have a single writer in your company because you can’t afford, for example, you don’t have the privilege to afford UX writing services and marketing services. So you will take these types of writers and guide them through how to communicate the digital product through the different phases from marketing to product. And that’s pretty challenging”.​​

“Because one side—the onboarding part is done by marketing, which is a very fine line and very clear line at the same time. And the product is essentially talking by itself to the person who’s using the product, which is mostly somebody else”.​​

Maintaining Consistency: Content Style Guides

When asked how to keep marketing and product copy in the same tone, Yuval introduces a critical framework.​

You Never Really Solve It

“I will say that you never really solve it. You always try to solve it. Why? Because products evolve and you have more features and more experiences that need to be created, and writers change. And it’s really challenging to create consistent and communicated experience in the way you communicate your product”.​​

Design Systems for Words

“If you look at marketing, a few years back they had brand books to create consistent brand experience. If you look at UX designers today, they have design systems in order to create consistent visual experience”.​​

The question: “What does UX writing people have? Exactly. So UX designers have the design systems. What we do as UX writers, content designers—and there are two different names for it—we used to call it content style guides, and we still call it content style guide sometimes, or content design systems”.​​

What It Contains

“Basically, it’s a communication style guide where we define the voice and tone in the digital experience”.​​

Yuval mentions having an article sharing 14 different open-source content style guides. Notable examples include:​​

• MailChimp’s style guide (quite dated, from about 10 years ago)
• Google’s Material Design writing style guides
• Shopify’s content style guide
• And many more​​

The Open Source Caveat

“Never trust an open-source content style guide. Most of the successful style guides that people use as an actual style guide are internal and are not open for the world to see from what I’m seeing in my perspective building a bunch of those for my clients”.​​

The Shirt Analogy

“It’s also like a shirt, right? Not every shirt suits everybody. So you need to buy the right shirt, the right hairstyle. When you think of it, it’s about which copy style suits which brand. So copying and just using it will not do the job in reality”.​​

The Recipe Approach

“Sometimes it also works as some kind of a recipe. So when you have a recipe, you don’t have to follow it, but it’s some kind of a guideline, a direction of ‘this is how your dish should be.’ This is the direction for that dish. This is the guideline for the dish. If you follow this guideline, you’ll probably have this dish”.​​

“So the guideline is also some kind of a recipe guideline for your product’s communication, just like you know design systems”.​​

How Copy Is Decided: The Testing Challenge

Yuval breaks down the process into two parts: choosing copy and testing copy.​

Choosing Copy: The Data-Informed Process

“First of all, we try to do, like with every UX decision, to be informed by data. So we’ll see data, we will do research obviously, and like user interviews, talk to our users, understand their pain points in the best possible way”.​​

The process includes:​​

• User interviews to understand pain points
• Social listening to see how people talk about pain points and products
• Benchmark and competitive analysis to see how others in the niche communicate
• Forming hypotheses based on data and gut feeling

“Because you never go only with the data. You also go with your gut feeling, because that’s what keeps us human”.​​

The Iceberg of UX Copy

“It’s almost another world out there. It’s just like below the ocean—it’s almost as much as above the ocean. It sounds the same when it comes to UX copy. You have like five words that took maybe months to figure out, or like a feature that was named in a way that maybe it took the company years to even figure out that that’s the name the feature should be named”.​​

Testing Copy: The Practical Reality

“Now about testing your copy, that’s a bit more challenging. Just like with design, you’re not going to test every color of every button. You’re probably going to test user flows”.​​

Example: “You’re going to rewrite or redesign with your design team a new onboarding flow, and then you could test that—like how many people actually finished it, or maybe do like user tests with people and see how well they finish that specific user flow”.​​

When You Have the Resources

“Obviously, you could do tests for copy only if you have the technical tools to do so. I know that many big, big, big companies have the privilege to test almost every piece of copy”.​​

Booking.com example: “Booking.com is testing every single copy on screen because they have a lot of money, a lot of team members, and also a lot of personas as well”.​​

The AI Advantage

“They have AI involvement specifically in that, where Booking can identify what creates better conversions for a specific persona, and then they have this AI that changes the copy live based on what will perform better. They have that because they have a lot of money”.​​

For Most Companies

“Most of us, even like big companies that earn a lot of money and like B2B products, they don’t have the privilege to test every single copy on screen. We have some tests that are quite easy—like testing open rates of email, click-through rates of email, download rates of apps in the App Store”.​​

“In those specific areas, it’s quite easy to test the copy. And in some areas, it’s a bit more challenging, so we will go for testing user flows and not specific copy”.​​

Language and Cultural Considerations

One of the most complex aspects of UX writing is localization.​​

The Small Branch With Big Impact

“UX writing is considered to be a small branch in the UX umbrella called user experience, which is under a huge—not after today, but a bigger umbrella called the product. So under the product, we have a smaller umbrella called user experience. Under it we have the UX writing. And under that umbrella, we have a smaller branch named localization”.​​

Why It Matters

“Even though it’s like a small umbrella, that specific aspect is worth a lot of money for many companies. That specific aspect would be how my product is going to penetrate different markets outside of my original market—how I’m going to penetrate the Spanish-speaking market, German-speaking market, and so on. And that’s the practice called localization”.​​

Translation vs. Localization

“Many people transition to this field from translation. So they had a lot of experience in translation. Now they’re doing localization”.​​

The critical difference: “What’s the difference between translation and localization? The difference is the UX writing. The difference is keeping it user-centric”.​​

Why Direct Translation Fails

“You do have cultural differences. You have more vocabulary—literally you have more vocabulary in the German language than in, I don’t know, in the Hebrew language. So probably you have many more ways to communicate while you’re trying to communicate”.​​

“If you use Google Translate, you’re probably going to miss the cultural aspects. There’s even a chance that if you directly translate it, you’re still going to miss it. Because if you would say that specific word, it would be inappropriate in another language”.​​

The Solution: Bilingual UX Writers

“The solution for that—and that’s a difficult solution—is to find a bilingual UX writer. Wow, that’s a lot, I know. But companies do it”.​​

Example: “Just imagine you have someone that lives in Belgium—like my friend Pavel. He lives actually in Poland but is originally Belgium. He speaks maybe four different languages. I know that he knows Polish and he knows English and Dutch, and I think now Portuguese. And he is also a UX writer”.​​

“So he is a very good asset to all of his clients because his clients could work with him and he could help them to penetrate this type of markets. He could even—a person like that could even manage a team of translators while he will just give them the UX aspect, like ‘this is the type of direction we should have UX-wise,’ because he understands the cultural aspects of people in Poland or the cultural aspects of people in Brazil”.​​

The AI Assist

“Bilingual UX writers are the best solution for that. I feel like AI is also kind of helping. It’s not solving, like understanding and knowing the other language, but you could always talk with Claude or ChatGPT and ask to translate but also ask to identify risks and pain points and where there is a potential for words to be lost in translation and stuff like that”.​​

The Risks of Poor UX Writing

When asked about the consequences of not having proper copy control or mechanisms, Yuval doesn’t hold back.​

The Moderate Risk: Features Nobody Uses

“First of all, companies are doing their own thing, building and building and building. Smart entrepreneurs like yourself are not going to wait for people to make everything perfect—we need to move forward”.​​

“But at the end of the day, the risk is that there are going to be poor user experiences for many different reasons. One would be that there are areas in the products that are overlooked—meaning people just don’t get it and they don’t know how to use it”.​​

“Maybe you worked on a feature for a long, long, long time, but not enough people know about it and not enough people even use it because it’s not clear enough. That’s like a mellow risk”.​​

The Big Risk: Insensitive Communication

Yuval offers a financial app example.​

“Let’s say that you work in a financial app or like a banking app, and you create a message that is very not sensitive. For example, ‘loan is not approved.’ Someone applied for a loan, the loan is not approved”.​​

The lazy approach: “You could just write whatever copy—let the developers write it, nobody cares, blah blah blah—and then it will say like ‘loan declined,’ and people would not understand what’s going on. They would be very sad about it. People are going to be upset with your services because ‘loan declined,’ and they may not come back. They may not come back ever. They’re not going to come back”.​​

The empathetic approach: “But if you would write with empathy and you have a UX writer on board that would just communicate it and say, ‘Hey, your loan was not approved, but this is what you can do if you still want to use our products and services,’ and maybe offer a solution or an alternative or maybe give them a guideline for next time, or just overall try to create better user experience overall—that would probably be better”.​​

The Catastrophic Risk: Data Loss

Yuval paints a vivid worst-case scenario.​

“Another catastrophe is just like, I don’t know, people doing mistakes while using your product. I don’t know, they use UX Army and they have this big folder that they worked on for the past three years, and they pressed the button. They didn’t understand what they were doing because people work with—you know, you have this book by Daniel Kahneman, ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’—so you have the automatic brain. People usually work with automatic brain, and they don’t stop and think”.​​

“And then voilà, they deleted three years of work because you didn’t create enough friction and communication to make them stop and think and understand exactly what they are doing. So that’s the most catastrophic thing they could do”.​​

Team Structure and Ratios

When asked about the appropriate size of a UX writing team for a B2B SaaS product, Yuval references UX Writing Hub’s survey data.​

The Historical Context

“Based on the survey that we’ve been doing at the UX Writing Hub, we always ask, ‘What’s the ratio of designers and UX writers, and UX designers in your company?'”.​​

“So in the beginning, like six years ago, five years ago, it was like one to 100. Like, ‘We have 100 designers in the company, I’m the only writer. It’s a catastrophe, it’s terrible, I’m not happy'”.​​

The Optimal Ratio

“We also asked how happy people are with the status. So based on our survey, based on our data, the perfect ratio of writers in product teams would be one to three to one to five”.​​

What this means: “For every three to five designers, have one UX writer. That means that if you have three different product teams with three different designers, it’s a good likelihood that you might want to have one writer for all of these teams”.​​

Why This Ratio Works

“Obviously, writing is simpler—it’s not simpler, but it takes less time than designing”.​​

Measuring Performance: The KPI Challenge

The conversation turns to one of the hardest questions in UX writing.​

Why It’s Tough

“First of all, it’s tough to measure. It’s tough, it’s difficult. Even in UX design in general, it’s difficult”.​​

“You could say, ‘Okay, based on the output, based on the assets, design assets that you have’—I’m talking about you, designer—’so you tend to really measure a person by the amount of screens they produce.’ Because they might produce 100 screens, and there are 10. So how do you make sure that people are actually doing great work?”.​​

Yuval’s Approach

“If you want to have an idea about how to measure it, it would be with the amount of successful projects that were eventually implemented and used by users. That’s what I would say”.​​

The UX Army Approach

The host shares their methodology: “We define the KPIs by, let’s say if design is provided by our designers for UX Army, then we run a usability test because we practice what we preach. And then we try to see how many usability errors, how many people could actually complete the task, was the task completed on time. And that defines the designer’s KPI”.​​

The Team Dynamics KPI

Yuval adds an important dimension.​

“I would add some KPI with how this person works in teams. Because if we have one writer for three designers, this person needs to be very good in also internal communication, running internal workshops, and communicating with people, sharing ideas with your team, and being very available also to people that need you”.​​

“Because when people need you, they are going to need you. And being available for them—that’s a good KPI, like how available this person is for different tasks that we give them”.​​

The Challenge of Standards

“The number of copywriters are relatively low. They started to increase at one point in time phenomenally, but then there was this technological fall-through or meltdown which actually has paused this. But it’s something to think about—not just you, but also us as a company providing a research platform—how can the KPIs be measured not just for copy but also for other aspects of design as well”.​​

“I wouldn’t say there will be a gold standard because every interface is different, the audience is different”.​​

Final Thoughts: Words as Design Elements

Yuval’s journey from QA tester to graphic designer to UX designer to founder of the world’s leading UX writing community reveals an important truth about digital product development.​​

Words were never actually an afterthought—we just treated them that way. Every button label, error message, onboarding instruction, and confirmation dialog shapes user experience as powerfully as visual design choices.​​

The distinction between marketing copy and product copy matters because the goals fundamentally differ: conversion versus guidance, selling versus teaching. Yet maintaining consistency across this transition requires intentional frameworks—content style guides that function like design systems for language.​

Testing copy presents unique challenges compared to testing visual design. While giants like Booking.com can A/B test every word with AI-powered personalization, most companies must strategically test at the user flow level, focusing resources on high-impact areas like onboarding, critical transactions, and error states.​​

Localization reveals the gap between translation and true user-centricity. Direct translation misses cultural nuances, vocabulary differences, and contextual appropriateness—which is why bilingual UX writers who understand both language and user experience principles are such valuable assets.​

The risks of poor UX writing range from overlooked features to catastrophic data loss. A clumsy “loan declined” message loses customers permanently, while a confusing delete confirmation destroys years of user work. These aren’t edge cases—they’re predictable consequences of treating words as less important than pixels.​

Team ratios have evolved from absurd (one writer for 100 designers) to reasonable (one writer for three to five designers). And while KPIs remain challenging to define, focusing on successful project implementation and team availability provides practical measurement approaches.​

Perhaps most importantly, Yuval’s work through UX Writing Hub—training over 1,200 students, building a 25,000-member community, and serving clients globally—proves that UX writing has moved from overlooked niche to recognized discipline.​​

The words on your screen aren’t filler between design elements. They are design elements. And companies that understand this—that invest in content design systems, bilingual localization, empathetic communication, and skilled UX writers—create experiences that convert, retain, and delight.​

As digital products become more complex and global audiences more diverse, the discipline Yuval helped establish will only grow more critical. Because at the end of the day, users don’t just look at interfaces—they read them.​

Thank you for reading!

If Yuval’s insights on UX writing, content design, and localization resonated with you, share this article with product teams that need to elevate their product communication.

Have questions about building content style guides or establishing UX writing practices? Connect with us at hi@uxarmy.com

Special thanks to Yuval Keshtcher for his pioneering work building the UX Writing Hub community and for sharing his expertise on making words matter in digital products.

And thank you to all of you for being part of the User Insights community.

⚡ This podcast is brought to you by UXArmy, an all-in-one UX research tool.